Supporting software documentation with source code summarization

TL;DR

This paper introduces Suncode, an automated source code summarization method that effectively captures code dependencies and generates summaries for classes and methods, enhancing software documentation quality.

Contribution

Suncode is a novel approach that summarizes both classes and methods while considering code dependencies, outperforming existing automated methods.

Findings

Suncode provides better code dependency summaries than previous methods.

Generated summaries support and improve existing software documentation.

Manual summaries remain more precise and concise.

Abstract

Source code summarization is a process of generating summaries that describe software code, the majority of source code summarization usually generated manually, where the summaries are written by software developers. Recently, new automated approaches are becoming more useful. These approaches have been found to be effective in some cases. The main weaknesses of these approaches are that they never exploit code dependencies and summarize either the software classes or methods but not both. This paper proposes a source code summarization approach (Suncode) that produces a short description for each class and method in the software system. To validate the approach, it has been applied to several case studies. Moreover, the generated summaries are compared to summaries that written by human experts and to summaries that written by a state-of-the-art solution. Results of this paper found that Suncode summaries provide better information about code dependencies comparing with other studies. In addition, Suncode summaries can improve and support the current software documentation. The results found that manually written summaries were more precise and short as well.